The Comparison And The Evaluation In Prosody Between Accented Mandarin And Standard Mandarin

To enhance the communication between different parts of the country, Standard Mandarin is needed to be popularized throughout the country. However, there are many dialects in China, so how to evaluate the level of the accented Mandarin is always a hot subject for researchers. The comparison in prosody between accented Mandarin and standard Mandarin and the investigation of the differences between the two will shed light on the way to the objective evaluation for proficiency level of Standard Mandarin, be conductive to the learning of Mandarin, and offer implications for second language learning. Along with the improvement of the technology of speech synthesis, the research of the speech prosody is regarded more and more. Accented Mandarin is influenced more or less by the dialect, which makes it more difficult to synthesize and recognize. So the comparison between accented Mandarin and standard Mandarin is in dire need.In the interest of satisfying the demand of practice research and application, this paper anal size the current phonetics study direction and existent problem. There are four major sessions in this paper:1) This paper compares the parameters of accented Mandarin (Cantonese-accent is used in this paper) and standard Mandarin based on the models used for the language classification of the rhythm developed by Ramus and Grabe Obvious difference is observed between Cantonese-accented Mandarin and Standard Mandarin.2) By comparing the results in this paper with the results of other languages derived by other researchers, the two languages are classified to the syllable-timed language, especially for the Cantonese-accented Mandarin. Comparing with Cantonese, Cantonese-accented Mandarin is influenced by the dialect.3) Other prosodic differences between Cantonese-accented Mandarin and standard Mandarin have also been analyzed, on an acoustic basis. The features investigated are variations in the accenting position, the levels of accent, the position of breaks and the levels of break.4) A method of classification is given to the output results by adopting the LVQ neural network, which supplies the reference for the future evaluation of Mandarin Level Test. In comparison with the result of perception, LVQ is an effective means for classification. The further development of the evaluation system will be based on the model of rhythm classification and LVQ classification.This model can also be applied to the evaluation of accented Mandarin in other regions. It can not only offer guidance for dialect-speaking people to learn Mandarin but also offer some information for speech recognition of accented Mandarin. This paper is mainly based on the corpus of read speech, so for future research, the study of the accented Mandarin should be based on spontaneous speech. A result of the study can be used to examine the influence of a speaker's first language on their production of second language rhythm, such as the comparison between English spoken by Chinese and Standard English.